It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster!
to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that
leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content quite, or quite secure,
for at any moment the brute would be stirring, this hatred...
-- Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway (11)
... religious ecstasy made people callous (so did causes)....
-- Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway (10)
Much rather would she have been one of those people like Richard who
did things for themselves, whereas, she thought, waiting to cross,
half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to
make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew (and now the
policeman held up his hand) for no one was ever for a second taken in.
Oh if she could have had her life over again! she thought, stepping
on to the pavement, could have looked even differently!
-- Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway (9)
To love makes one solitary...
-- Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway (23)
It was not beauty; it was not mind. It was something central which
permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold
contact of man and woman, or of women together. For *that* she could
dimly perceive. She resented it, had a scruple picked up Heaven knows
where, or, as she felt, sent by Nature (who is invariably wise); yet
she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman, not a
girl, of a woman confessing, as to her they often did, some scrape,
some folly. And whether it was pity, or their beauty, or that she was
older, or some accident -- like a faint scent, or a violin next door
(so strange is the power of sounds at certain moments), she did
undoubtedly then feel what men felt. Only for a moment; but it was
enough. It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one
tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion,
and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world
come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure
of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an
extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that
moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an
inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard
softened. It was over -- the moment.
-- Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway (34)
So on a summer's day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and
fall; and the whole world seems to be saying 'that is all' more and
more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the
sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the
heart. Fear not more, says the heart, committing its burden to some
sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins,
collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee;
the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking.
-- Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway (42-43)
By conviction an atheist perhaps, he is taken by surprise with moments
of extraordinary exaltation. Nothing exists outside us except a state
of mind, he thinks; a desire for solace, for relief, for something
outside these miserable pigmies, these feeble, these ugly, these
craven men and women. But if he can conceive of her, then in some
sort she exists, he thinks, and advancing down the path with his eyes
upon sky and branches he rapidly endows them with womanhood; sees with
amazement how grave they become; how majestically, as the breeze stirs
them, they dispense with a dark flutter of the leaves charity,
comprehension, absolution, and then, flinging themselves suddenly
aloft, confound the piety of their aspect with a wild carouse.
-- Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway (62)